Why Romney Lost And Republicans Keep Losing

One would have thought Mitt Romney would have cruised to a landslide victory this Tuesday past. No president had been elected with such abysmal employment numbers since FDR won in 1936. I can’t think of any president in my lifetime that has fomented greater division among the populace, spurring class warfare and widening racial divisions. Even though one of the greatest of rhetoricians, a silver tongued chameleon brilliantly malleable to weave his messages to whatever the crowd genre, it still hasn’t sunk in that he pulled off this victory. The political axiom is elections are about “jobs, the economy, jobs, and the economy.” Has anything so drastically changed to alter this equation?

Let’s travel back over the four recessions prior to the 2008-09 downturn and measure the time it took to get back to pre-recession employment levels. Courtesy of a chart prepared by J P Morgan here are some interesting statistics. The recession of 1974-76 only took 20 months to return to pre-downturn employment levels. The 1981-82 recession returned 26 months later while the 1990-91 slump fully rebounded after 32 months and the decline of 2001 recovered in 47 months. But here we are in the final months of 2012 fully 58 months after 2008-09 was officially declared a recession in December of 2007 and we are still 2.7% above pre-recession employment levels and you can’t even see any peephole of light in the tunnel. Compounding the anemia is that the “employee participation rate” is at 63.6%. Until this current malaise, from 1990 onward there was never a time when it sank below 66% and there were numerous years where the average participation rate exceeded 67%. If you “normalize” this rate at 66.5% then it would add over 4.5 million souls to the jobless rolls. It also increases the unemployment rate by 3 full percentage points.

A set of facts like these adumbrate a Romney victory. So something else must have been at work……something that made perhaps millions of voters flee. It was an election of two different business models: The Obama statist/socialist versus the smaller government capitalist ideals of Romney. I enthusiastically pulled the Romney-Ryan lever and felt confident in victory.

What Happened

The GOP has the look and feel of a theocracy. The evangelical movement has co-opted the Republican Party and given it a veneer of intolerance. It is wonderful to have strong religious beliefs, just keep them to yourself. America is a secular nation and separation of church and state is enshrined in our Constitution. That said, America is, contrary to what the president proclaims, a Christian country. From my perspective this translates that our government is founded on and our laws constructed on the Judeo-Christian ethic grounded in the Ten Commandments. It implies a tolerance and embrace for people of different cultures and different religious beliefs. When I hear a controversy about whether or not the Ten Commandments can be posted in a school or outside of some state capital building I think the point is being missed. These “laws” should be viewed as a secular gesture of what binds Americans together. However religious or agnostic one is, in addition to any religious symbolism you care to attach, the Ten Commandments is a signpost of our American culture. “In God We Trust” on our currency is not a religious endorsement but a reminder that God and the secular are not mutually exclusive. There is however a “tipping point”, a place where the religious tends to crowd out the secular and to me crosses the divide of separation of church and state.

Each speech, Republican candidates often competed for most religious, most “family values”, most pro-life. The definition of conservative has shifted from running a responsible government with a balanced budget to how many days a week you punched your attendance ticket at church. It borders on zealotry. If your credentials on abortion don’t go back at least five generations, you might be branded an apostate. In the Republican senate primary in Texas Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst was upset by Tea Party favorite Ted Cruz. The battle was nasty and it all boiled down that Cruz was able paint Dewhurst as an establishment moderate. The evangelical movement is inflexible on the wrong issues. It is clear their votes indispensable to any successful Republican white house bid. The best way to promote “family values” is to fix the economy so more jobs are created so people have enough money to raise their families properly. Who goes to what church and how often is a measure of nothing.

Where is the party for the moderate Republican like myself? I am guided by issues like the “fiscal cliff” and how much my taxes are going up. Foreign policy is important, but at the end of the day, secondary. I don’t want to hear the word abortion ever on a campaign trail. I have three daughters so I cringe when Neanderthals like Missouri senate candidate Todd Akin are making claims that women don’t get pregnant during “legitimate” rape, whatever that means. One would think these wing nuts might have gained a smidgeon of wisdom from that example of idiocy, but sure enough Indiana senate hopeful Richard Mourdock went off and announced that pregnancy from rape must be “something God intended”. How bizarre to contemplate such a fatuous insensate guy legislating on our behalf. This medieval retrograde thinking has no place in our political dialogue....And don't you know other Republican candidates expend massive energy to escape being painted with the same brush.

Given the demographic leftward shift of our country, sand is rapidly coursing through the hourglass for the GOP. Evangelicals must reduce their intransigence on abortion and gays. I know a couple of gays who actually cast their ballot for Romney. They held their noses and did it. Job creation and fiscal issues won out over some pretty rabidly anti-gay rhetoric…..neither had even one gay friend that voted Republican. Conversely, I listened to dinner table talk as women discuss abortion as if the election were a referendum for this single issue. Jobs or taxes were tertiary compared to the concept of losing control over basic rights over their own bodies. For so many women “choice” is the sine qua non in a government. How many hundreds of thousands or millions of women would change their vote over this one issue? Why can’t the platform be modified to say “we don’t agree with abortion, we think it is wrong but we are TOLERANT and will allow choice for women", and then do something similar on gay rights. If the GOP wants to ever grace the presidential winners circle again, I just told them how to do it.